I run a monthly CEO cohort. A small group of leaders who meet to think out loud about the real challenges of running a business.
A few months ago, one of them (I’ll call him Bill) came in describing what most CEOs eventually describe. His team wasn’t stepping up. They waited to be told what to do. They checked in instead of deciding. Capable, experienced people who somehow couldn’t seem to operate without him in the loop.
He’d been working on succession for two years. The plan was solid. The problem was his people weren’t developing into it.
“People suck,” he said, with the tired directness of someone who has genuinely tried everything. “If my business just didn’t need people, I’d have so much more fun.”
Everyone laughed. Because everyone in the room has felt exactly that.
We spent the next hour working through it. About halfway through, I asked him to describe how he typically handled it when one of his team members struggled with a decision.
He explained that he’d step in to help them think it through, mostly by explaining what they needed to do. He knew their limitations, so he knew what he needed to do to help them. He was, after all, the one ultimately responsible for the outcome.
“How long have you been operating this way?” I asked.
He thought about it. “Years, I guess.”
“And in that time, how much have they developed?”
The room went quiet.
Bill was experiencing what most leaders face when they talk about people not stepping up. It looks like a capability problem. Or a motivation problem. It isn’t. It’s actually a development problem. They are not stepping up, because the leader keeps stepping in.
From real experience, Bill believed that his people needed him close to the decisions. That belief was acting like a tuning fork emitting a frequency. The message was clear: I will help solve your problems. And his people were resonating with it perfectly, waiting, checking in, deferring, and giving him exactly the evidence to reinforce his belief. The loop was invisible to him because he was inside it.
This is not unique to Bill. Most leaders are taught that their job is to help their people succeed, so it feels right to step in, clarify, and solve. And that instinct is precisely what prevents development from happening.
Most leaders don’t recognize that their organization behaves in response to what the leader believes—their unconscious Context. Like a tuning fork that influences everything in the room to vibrate with its frequency, people in organizations operate the same way. They behave in accordance with the tone emanating from the leader, not because of how they were instructed or what they agreed to. The leader’s Context, the mostly unconscious set of beliefs driving their actions, is the frequency the organization resonates with.
Here’s what made this more than a daily frustration for Bill: his succession plan required people who could operate without him, yet his Context was training them to need him. Without knowing it, he was building an organization that couldn’t function without him. Not because his people lacked capability, but because he was unconsciously preventing them from developing it.
Toward the end of the conversation, Bill stopped mid-sentence.
“I can see,” he said slowly, “where this is a downward spiral caused by me as a leader. Because I’m not creating the environment, the context, in which they can perform.”
A pause.
“I probably wouldn’t want to work for myself.”
That’s the moment. Not the intellectual understanding that leadership shapes culture. Most CEOs know that. The actual felt recognition that the pattern they are most frustrated by is one they are running, every day, without seeing it.
The question isn’t how to fix the people. The question Bill sat with—and the one worth sitting with if any of this feels familiar—is a different one entirely.
It’s not: how do I get my people to perform?
But: how do I lead in a way that develops them into the people the organization needs them to become?
This shift doesn’t require a new system. It requires recognizing the frequency you’re running and honestly asking if it’s producing the organization you actually want.